Hitler’s Valkyrie: Unity Mitford at 100

On 8 August 1914, four days after the declaration of war, Unity Valkyrie Mitford was born, the fifth child and fourth daughter of David and Sydney Freeman-Mitford, who admired the actress Unity Moore. Grandfather Redesdale suggested Valkyrie, after his friend Wagner’s Norse war-maidens. The fact that Unity Valkyrie had been conceived in the town of Swastika, Ontario, where her father was prospecting for gold, made it all the more portentous.

A few weeks after her birth, Unity and her mother (‘Muv’) joined ‘Farve’, who was with his regiment in Newcastle. His quarters were so cramped that Unity was laid to sleep in a drawer. But this was nothing to the hot-house atmosphere of life in rural Oxfordshire, where the family went to live after the deaths of David’s elder brother in 1915, and his father in 1916, when he became the 2nd Lord Redesdale. Two more, equally spirited  daughters were born by 1920 — Jessica, then Deborah, joining Nancy, Pamela, Tom, Diana and Unity.

The intensity of their family life made the Mitfords, like the Brontës, create a world of their own. Six variations of the same face and voice, the sisters were each distinctive but all confident, vivid and driven, a dangerous combination for girls who were finished but not educated. Unity was the boldest, and at 6ft 1in the tallest; she lived to shock. To a cousin she was ‘the great, white hope, far and away the most loved, they caught from her all the excitement’. In 1929, in an effort to control her, Unity was sent to boarding school but she was soon expelled — twice.

When the sisters ever mentioned expulsion, Muv would say, ‘No, darling. Just asked to leave.’ She would take her pet rat, Ratular, or her snake, Enid, to dances, and developed a craze for attending boxing and wrestling matches.